For the past few years, major monitor manufacturers seem to be in a race to see who can make the fastest monitor on the marketa range currently owned by ASUS and Zowie with their PG24QP and XL2586X respectively, which reach 560 Hz. However, and although it is obviously not a commercial model, it is curious that the fastest monitor in the world is currently a model. Cathode ray tube…yes, those old “tubes”, with which they achieved a refresh rate of 700 Hz.
In short, the refresh rate of a monitor indicates the number of frames it is capable of representing per second, so a monitor with a refresh rate of 700 Hz will display 700 frames per second. The higher the value, the less “jumps” we see on the screen, so what we see will give us the sensation of being more fluid.
A 700 Hz CRT monitor, crazy!
All this comes from the YouTube channel RetroGamingBase, which has been experimenting for some time to see how far it can go when it comes to overclocking a monitor, and the best values have been obtained precisely with an old CRT monitor from the Iiyama brand. , values that They far exceed what modern high-end monitors have not yet reached, even remotely.
Obviously and as we have already said, this is not a commercial model for obvious reasons, so it is more a news of curiosity than anything else. In addition, to achieve such a high refresh rate on the monitor, they had to reduce the resolution considerably, especially since it was running at 320 x 120 pixels. You can see the whole process in the video that we have embedded above these lines.
But regardless of the resolution at which they achieved this milestone, seeing 700Hz on a decades-old CRT monitor is quite astonishing and demonstrates some of the inherent advantages of these types of monitors. CRTs don’t have the same limitations as the LCDs we use today, and as long as you’re willing to give up a high resolution, CRTs have a significantly higher refresh rate headroom and also no ghosting issues without the need for technologies like G-Sync or FreeSync. Additionally, many retro enthusiasts continue to hold onto these monitors because they’re the ones that perform best when using older consoles, like the Nintendo NES or SEGA MegaDrive.
Of course, at this point you will never see a CRT monitor on a list of the “best monitors”, firstly because they stopped being manufactured years ago, and secondly because we can’t imagine that anyone would be willing to use a monitor for playing games (since such a refresh rate is obviously intended for gaming) with a resolution lower than Full HD. However, we repeat, it is interesting to see how enthusiasts continue to take the oldest technology to unimagined heights, and in this case, to raise the refresh rate of a monitor from the 80s to levels that even the best and most expensive modern monitors are not capable of. achieving, at least for now.
